Designed to complement "The Oxford Compact English Dictionary", this comprehensive thesaurus provides thousands of alternative words to choose from to aid letter, essay and report writing, and crossword puzzles and creative writing. As well as full coverage of general English, the synonym lists also include more unusual words and phrases, including dialectal expressions and many idioms. Synonyms are clearly labelled to show whether an expression is, for example, British, American, or Australian, literary or technical, colloquial, old-fashioned, or slang.